Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, U of Toronto, 252 Bloor St. W.

(directly
above St. George subway stop)

Eightth Floor, Room
8- 214

“Our ordinary
mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that
our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but
that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something
better: that we can become oak trees.”--E.F.
Schumacher

withBrian Milani, course coordinator and author of Designing the Green Economy.
In this class, we’ll introduce ourselves, and look at the principles that
make green economics a holistic paradigm of economic development. What
makes this perspective based on ecological alternativesdifferent
from one based on environmental
protection?

withMartin Liefhebber, green architect and
community designer. Martin is an award-winning designer most well-known
for the off-the-grid CMHC Healthy
House, but the scope of his pioneering work includes straw bale,
rammed earth and “earthship” buildings, as well as radically affordable
shelter for the homeless and participatory community design. Social
justice, human health, ecological regeneration, community vitality and
spiritual renewal are all part of Martin’s design concerns. He is
proficient in both the theory and practice of ecological design, serving as
an adjunct assistant professor of architecture at the University of Toronto.Along with Greg Allen (see below), Martin was presented a Lifetime
Achievement Award for his contributions to green building and sustainable
communities at the 2005 at the TorontoRegionalGreenBuilding Festival.

withJohn Cartwright, president, Labour Council of Toronto and York Region.

John hails from the
Carpenters union and is a former head of the Building Trades Council, where
he was instrumental in advancing green building initiatives.One of Canada’s
most visionary labour leaders, he has a keen understanding of both the
job-creation and quality-of-life potentials of eco-development.He is an outspoken advocate of community
development, municipal democracy and healthy cities.But achieving these goals, he insists,
depends on including all workers in the process and providing good living
wage jobs to the region.John will
provide a Green Labour perspective on ecological economic development for Toronto.

withBeth JonesA veteran
activist with a long resume of environmental and social justice involvement,
Beth has also been an innovator, particularly in the realm of sustainable
transportation—co-founding Moving
the Economy, the City of Toronto-supported organization spawned by the
groundbreaking 1998 conference of the same name. Beth’s work at MTE helped
lay the groundwork for a New Mobility Hub in the Toronto region—combining
local and regional transit, bike-sharing, bike lockers, a taxi-hotline,
car-sharing services and more.The Mobility
Hubs have been taken up by Greater Toronto Transportation Authority (now Metrolinx)
as part of their strategy for the GTA.Beth
has also worked as transit advocate for the Toronto Environmental Alliance
and consults on sustainable transportation issues.

A green economy is about much more than
environmental protection. It is about a transition to new forms of qualitative development. Regeneration
of communities goes hand-in-hand with ecosystem regeneration. This requires
many new measures of quality, from Genuine Progress Indicators, to
eco-footprints, to life-cycle assessments, to firm sustainability reporting,
to social and health statistics, to community indicators.Community is important not only because it
is the base for decentralized eco-technologies in energy, food, recycling,
etc., but because it is where quality of life is a lived experience.Community indicators have to synthesize and
encapsulate all our knowledge about life in easily understandable and
actionable ways.

In the last 15
years, a new sector of largely non-market networked information-sharing and
mass collaboration has arisen in the interstices of the old industrial information
economy. Not only has it provided new possibilities for individual autonomy
and social cooperation, but it also promises more fundamental transformations
of our economy and society.While the
dominant software and electronics giants design for monopoly and
obsolescence, a growing band of merry collaborators, software anarchists and
database developers are pioneering new political and economic
relationships.

Michael Pilling
is a pioneer in actualizing new informational potentials for political and
economic participation.Chief Editor
at Openpolitics.ca and
founder of the Open Politics Foundation, Michael has a background that spans
public policy, writing, the creative arts and web development. In 2004, as Head of Platform and Research for
the Green Party of Canada, he designed, with the help of other party
activists, a process called the living
platform which enabled the decentralized creation of a party platform on
the internet.He is the technical
coordinator of Green EnterpriseToronto’s wiki-directory
project.

Roberto has
more than 5 years of experience in planning, management, consulting, communications/marketing
and finance in the public, private and international development sectors. He
holds a bachelor degree in Commerce from ConcordiaUniversity, with a
specialization in Management information Systems and eCommerce and is
currently pursuing a Master in Environmental Studies degree focused on
community-based energy at YorkUniversity.

Mike Schreiner
is Vice President of Local Food Plus,
and co-founder of WOW Foods, a
Toronto-based home delivery service for organic food that for ten years has
linked consumers with local organic farmers. After growing up on a
conventional grain and livestock farm, Mike earned Bachelor degrees in
business administration and history, as well as a Masters in history. A former
member of the Toronto Food Policy Council, Mike is also a
board member of Green EnterpriseToronto.

Susan
has over 10 years of experience in the micro-finance arena, including program
development, community development and outreach, member service, and revenue
growth. She is currently the Community Economic Development Specialist at Alterna Savings,
where she and has successfully managed the Community Micro Loan Program for
over five years. Prior, Susan was a Business Loan Specialist at the CalmeadowMetrofund in Toronto. At Alterna
Savings, Susan has helped over 373 micro entrepreneurs achieve their goals
through lending, coaching, educational and networking events and more.

This
year’s course closes with a bang, featuring two of Toronto’s most visionary pioneers of green
economic development.

Wayne Roberts
is the innovative coordinator of the City of Toronto’s Food Policy Council, two-fisted politics &
economics commentator for NOW magazine, and Toronto’s all-purpose green economics
guru. He has a doctorate in labour history and economics, and a
background in a number of movements for social change. In 1992, he helped
co-found the Coalition for a Green Economy,
and soon co-authored the classic work of practical green economic strategies,
GET A LIFE! How to make
a good buck, Dance around the dinosaurs, and Save the world while you're at
it
(Toronto: Get a Life Publishers, 1995).A realization of the pivotal position of the food system for social
change led him increasingly to focus on food as a means of connecting the
wide-ranging social, cultural, political, health, economic, and ecological
benefits of green development.He
co-authored another classic Real Food for a Changein 1999 with Lori Stahlbrand and Rod MacRae.

Greg Allen—of Sustainable Edge consulting, the Energy Action Council of Toronto (EnerACT),
and the Canadian Green Building Council—has for over 30 years has been one of
Canada’s leading eco-engineers, at the cutting edge of innovation in
renewable energy, natural systems-based design, appropriate technology,
living machines, eco-building, and community-based organization to implement
all these things. He has been a catalyst of many of those
initiatives that have established Toronto’s reputation for
green-alternatives, including EnerACT, the Urban
Environment Centre, Green$aver, the Toronto
Renewable Energy Cooperative (WindShare), the Boyne
River Ecology School, Deep Lake Cooling, and the Better Buildings
Partnership.Along with Martin Liefhebber (see above), Greg was presented a Lifetime
Achievement Award for his contributions to green building and sustainable
communities at the 2005 at the Toronto Regional Green Building Festival; and
this year the City honoured him with a Green
Toronto Award for Leadership at the Green Living Festival.Greg is now working as a sustainable design
strategist for HOK architects.